This article explores the concept of partnerships in public humanities as both a process and a vital outcome. Drawing from experiences within a classroom environment, where university students and community members learned and engaged together, we identify three key precepts for sustaining effective community-university partnerships: centering human relationships, leveraging institutionalization, and redistributing risk. These strategies do not aim to avoid the challenges inherent in collaboration but rather use complexities as opportunities for deeper engagement. We argue that community-university partnerships should themselves be viewed as a valuable and meaningful form of public humanities.

How can staging local stories sustain local relationships and community programs? How can community storytelling projects reshape understandings of what research is, does, and for whom? In considering these questions, I draw on my experience facilitating 10+ Voices projects. These community storytelling collaborations collect, weave together, and perform true stories. Focusing on Solidarity Garden Voices (2023), I trace motivating and guiding principles, including 1) centering community knowledges and choices, 2) celebrating programs beyond my (or any individual) control, and 3) presenting insights inside stories of the lives they come from. I ground these principles in lived moments, as this article is both a portrait of what community-centered research can look like and a song about how such research can feel: disorienting, overwhelming, freeing, inspiring, necessary. Shared.

Evidence synthesis is increasingly recognised as an essential element of the provision and use of expert advice in areas of public reasoning and decision-making.1 Synthesis here refers to an authoritative account of the best available knowledge in a field or fields, relevant to a question of policy interest and accessible to all interested audiences. Synthesis as a practice is well established in many areas of science and medicine. Although less frequent in the humanities, recent examples from funders and the British Academy illustrate increasing recognition of its importance.2 This article outlines why synthesis matters and, while pointing to some systemic challenges, shows how it can be done. It illustrates the findings from the literature with practical material from two recent projects led by the authors.

“Caste No Bar?” navigates through Kolkata’s upper-caste Hindu Bengali matrimonial landscape and probes the patterns of matchmaking among families seeking brides for NRI (non-resident Indian) grooms. The matrimonial market, I argue, neatly foregrounds everyday casteism. If the parent community in West Bengal harbours a distinguished obsession with caste, the Bengali diaspora transports such caste enthusiasm beyond geographical confines to reproduce and reinforce caste on a global terrain. The apparent liberal progressive image of educated Bengali families with well-educated NRI grooms is grossly denuded in the matrimonial market. Across matrimonial columns and matrimonial websites, most advertisements mention their own caste affiliations; some stipulate preferred caste affiliations of the desired spouse, while many declare “Caste No Bar,” an oft-adduced phrase which adequately disguises the caste-fervour underlining Kolkata’s matrimonial market. Foregrounding the permeating social acceptability of endogamous marriages, this article scouts for the subtext of “Caste No Bar” that permits selective exogamy and precludes most boundary-crossings in a caste-charged matrimonial landscape that tellingly underpins caste bigotry.

Poet Nikki Giovanni’s death rocked scholarly and literary communities. The occasion of her 9 December 2024 death has prompted reflections on the life and legacy across genres and decades. As others write and talk about Giovanni from a purely “scholarly” angle analyzing her body of work, I offer here a glimpse into Nikki Giovanni the person who loved Black people and who welcomed me into her life and friend circle. I punctuate my essay with references to her poetry but mostly underscore her generosity, compassion, and human kindness infused into her creative expressions. Nikki was a poet’s poet beloved by many. Those who leaned into her wit, her unadulterated truth-telling about US racism, Black love, and Black self-love found in her life and work a refuge from worlds that deny, erase, and devalue. She elevated and amplified Black people and Black women specifically and humanity more broadly.

This article examines the transformative power of creative play in enhancing innovation, collaboration, and mental agility within professional and educational settings. It differentiates “creative play” from talent and leisure, arguing that creativity is an essential, learnable behavior. Drawing on personal experiences from the advertising industry and academia, as well as psychological research and case studies, the article illustrates how activities such as artist’s dates, museum visits, and drawing exercises stimulate cognitive flexibility and boost productivity. By advocating for the integration of creative practices into daily routines, it highlights the importance of fostering environments that support creative thinking and adaptability to drive innovation and maintain mental agility in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

Academic blogging is a digital platform for “doing” knowledge translation in the humanities. Knowledge translation is the process of communicating research outcomes outside academia so the public can benefit. While science communication is widely recognized as a medium for communicating science, technology, engineering, and mathematics knowledge with the public, formal mechanisms for knowledge facilitation in the humanities are not as well established. Academic blogging is core to the social value and impact of the humanities, representing an important open access entry point into humanistic scholarly debates. Drawing on a developing literature about academic blogging as well as a survey we conducted with readers, authors, and editors of academic blogs, this article shows how doing knowledge translation with academic blogs can support the three core domains of a university’s mission: research, teaching, and public outreach. With your research, you can use academic blogs to facilitate networking and collaborations; with your teaching, you can use academic blogs as tools to introduce students to a new topic; with public outreach, doing academic blogging enables you to connect with diverse readerships. Academic blogs contribute to knowledge translation for and about the humanities, from foundational concepts to new research and the more hidden aspects of academic practice.

Mothers of Sierra Leone leverages the power of filmic storytelling to improve maternal health outcomes in Sierra Leone, a country with one of the planet’s highest maternal mortality rates. Since 2019, we have operated as part of Lehigh University’s Global Social Impact program, working with a team of interdisciplinary students to amplify the voices of Sierra Leonean women rather than transmit Western medical expertise. Our project is based on two premises: (1) we will not solve the healthcare crisis in Sierra Leone through technology and (2) women experience better healthcare outcomes when they are confident and comfortable to advocate for themselves. Our focus group and survey data indicate that our filmic storytelling improves women’s confidence to advocate for themselves and increases their knowledge of available health services. Maternal mortality may be one of the most expansive health challenges facing our planet today because we struggle to comprehend or delimit its parameters, including structural and systemic racism, networks of capitalism, insufficient infrastructure, disparate access to medicine, and patriarchal violence. Our failures to tell public, accessible, and equitable stories about maternal mortality exacerbates and often exoticizes this crisis.

The public humanities have shaped ideas about sex, race, and gender. This is a cautionary tale that points to the repeated problems of the model of public humanities as academics or elites dispensing knowledge to a public audience. King Alfred of England ordered a set of texts “most needful for all men to know” translated into English. Long celebrated in English history as an example of public education, these translations also put forward certain ideas about race and sexuality for the emerging English public, a reminder of the ideological function of the public humanities. Likewise, modern scholars worried about medieval and classical texts that depict homosexuality becoming available to the public, so they refused to translate them or altered them. As a counter to such models, I consider the seventh-century Archbishop Theodore, a Syrian-born ecclesiast who ran the English church and who provides a model of a collaborative public humanities in which lay people shape knowledge and law together. Their model of public humanities encourages us to explore the historical Black public and their contributions to medieval studies that academic medieval studies have ignored.

Dubbed “the world’s first and oldest academic social network” by a grant reviewer at the National Science Foundation, HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory or “Haystack”) built its first interactive website in 2002. Now, 22 years later, HASTAC has some 18,000 network members, over 400 institutional members, and a thriving graduate-student-led HASTAC Scholars program that selects 100 new student members each year. Co-Director Cathy N. Davidson co-founded HASTAC with David Theo Goldberg and numerous other scholars in the humanities and social sciences working in tandem with computer scientists and programmers. Before Wikipedia, Facebook, or Twitter (now X), HASTAC created an open-access, public network with the purpose of making full use of evolving affordances of technology while also critiquing and seeking to improve issues of access, ethics, gender and racial bias, and social and environmental impact. This essay details what it takes to lead and sustain a dues-free, participatory social network with community standards and collaborative decision-making, and where any network member is invited to blog, post, start dialogues, and lead research initiatives, across institutional and other boundaries.

This article traces five hundred years of European and American academic and public music discourse through two disparate examples: Vicente Lusitano, a sixteenth-century Portuguese composer of African descent, and anti-Black comments directed at musicians Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones in the 1984 documentary I Love Quincy. These threads converge in the present day, as discourse involving Lusitano increasingly contains a form of anti-Blackness that parallels what is presented by the film’s white director, Eric Lipmann, and more recent popular music discourse that echoes his perspective. Moreover, the longitude of Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure offers a unique vantage from which we can observe recursive rhetorical devices – denial, fantasy, and erasure – over time and in varied cultural contexts. Because these tropes support contemporary American anti-Black viewpoints as well as similarly flawed and destructive argumentation from historically distant European societies, we can see the continuity of denial, fantasy, and erasure in five hundred years of discourse as a sign that these musical cultures favor domination.

This article introduces the reader to current work at the intersection of classical studies and the public humanities. It begins from the observation that in recent years, efforts by classical scholars to relate to a wider public have intensified and taken on a new quality. Not so long ago, public-facing research was considered detrimental to “real” scholarship. By contrast, as this article sets out to show, there is now a growing interest in a true exchange of perspectives, knowledges, and methodologies with stakeholders outside of the confines of the academe. I argue that some of the most interesting work in this space emerges from the way in which the aims and objectives of the public humanities intersect with several trends currently driving classical studies. These include the emergence of the digital humanities, the maturing of classical reception studies, and the (often difficult) conversations around calls to “decolonize” the classics.

US authorities justified their invasion of Iraq, in part, by claiming to be liberating Iraqi women from patriarchal oppression. Helen Benedict’s Sand Queen challenges this assertion, exposing how the war embraced a colonial paradigm with which Iraq was long familiar. By documenting the gender-based violence a female American soldier faces from her own side, the book demonstrates contradictions in the liberation rhetoric of US authorities.

In this article, I explore how public participation affects the research and production of history. As a way of making history more accessible, more participatory, and more connected to present-day public engagement with the past, public history fully belongs to the public humanities. In public participation as decentralization of the history-making process: the HistorEsch project in Luxembourg, I discuss the collaboration among historians, artists, and local residents to co-construct new public historical narratives of the town of Esch-sur-Alzette, in Luxembourg. As a paradigm, public history questions and reinvents the role of professional historians who share authority with other actors in the history-making process.

Dance creates change in underserved communities. It is not just performance art; instead, dance becomes ministry.1 In 2016, during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, I created my first site-specific dance film, Reverse,2 set in Watts and Compton, California, and featuring students from the University of Los Angeles, California (UCLA) and The Watts Willowbrook Boys & Girls Club (WBGC) culminating in a public performance at UCLA, and catching the eye of The New York Times.3 As this project shows, dance films educate audiences on social justice issues, and bridge the gap between communities, cultures, and academia through the principles of public humanities: cultural empowerment, social cohesion, inclusive representation, civic engagement, and public discourse.

Public humanities programs have the potential to engage diverse communities, while addressing the employability challenges faced by many humanities graduates. This article outlines how to build a humanities internship program that pays students to collaborate with local governments, museums, nonprofits, and healthcare organizations, on projects for public good. Through these mutually beneficial partnerships, students apply skills – such as writing, archival research, critical thinking, and data analysis – beyond the classroom, demonstrating the relevance of the humanities in real-world contexts. The article discusses key strategies for developing a sustainable program, including networking to build community partnerships, fundraising through small grants, and evaluating impact on all stakeholders. By reflecting on the successes and challenges of such a program, the article highlights the value of public humanities in preparing students for diverse careers while supporting community-driven projects.

Public dissertations allow doctoral students to engage a broader audience that is often already having conversations about our research topics, whether explicitly or not. The traditional dissertation is usually read by the committee (if you are lucky) and the author. Public projects allow early-career scholars to expand their marketability, relate their abstract topics to concrete discussions, and adapt to the changing demands of the academic space. This article includes a brief case study of the author’s public dissertation to suggest possible avenues for current graduate students and faculty mentors, along with a frank discussion about the pros and cons of such a project. Six tips provide a frank discussion of the pros and cons of such a project and possibilities for graduate students interested in a public project to consider.

Navigating a career beyond the traditional academic path can be both exciting and daunting for humanities professionals, often leaving them eager to explore new opportunities but unsure where to start. This article addresses five common challenges faced by those venturing outside academia and offers practical strategies for overcoming these obstacles. By tackling key issues such as translating academic expertise into broader contexts, expanding skill perceptions, and building professional networks, it provides actionable advice to help humanities graduates thrive in diverse career environments. Whether you are struggling with imposter syndrome or looking to leverage your unique skills, this guide aims to empower you to unlock new career possibilities and achieve success beyond academia.